Business Day
Olumide Alawode, a 56-year-old retired security man, spends what is left of his evenings every day staring at hundreds of betting numbers written with a black marker on a white canvas hung on a fence close to a tiny street. Armed with a blue pen and notebook that has seen the best of days, a burning cigarette, he tries to identify the correct odds in at least nine football games that could bring huge returns on his N200 bet.
The odds have to be correct for all the games. One number out of place, Alawode loses his N200. Eight out of 10 times, he loses the money only to return to the exact same spot the next day to try again.
.What I need is just one big game,” he says. He then gets into stories of his friends who hit the jackpot the previous day. One friend got the odds correctly last week and won N2 million.
“Just like that,” he gestures with his free hand, while still clutching the local cigarette in the other hand. The biggest money he won from a N200 bet was N50,000. Since then, when he manages to guess some of the numbers right his wins are within N10,000. When asked how he is able to predict the right odds, he replies, “Everything is luck.”
Nigeria’s booming football betting industry is built mainly on players chasing the next lucky day. Statistics or data are a byword that scarcely features in many people’s discussion on betting.
BusinessDay learns that there are now betting companies providing statistics of teams and players as added service to consumers.
A report projects that about 60 million Nigerians between the ages of 18 and 40 are involved in active sports betting, and football betting is the most popular segment of sports betting.
These Nigerians spend almost N2 billion on sports betting daily, which translates to about N730 billion annually. This is quite significant for a country where the 2022 national budget is N16.39 trillion. The sports betting market in Nigeria is estimated at $2 billion and is expected to grow primarily driven by the rapid spread of mobile phones.
Ademola Adediji, sports betting expert and broadcast journalist, says Nigeria’s large population makes it a magnet for gaming companies. Apart from that, there is the passionate enthusiasm for football shared by millions of Nigerians.
The country’s economic situation, which affects the income of many Nigerians, is also a factor. PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) in a 2019 report on the Gaming Industry in Nigeria noted that to some extent, the need for additional income in the face of the recent economic recession, which has left a number of youths unemployed and underemployed, had provided a boost to the base of gaming users – in particular, sports betting and lotteries.
“Most Nigerians of legal betting age see sports betting as a means of escaping the economic situation in the country,” Adediji says.
